The Infamous Ibanez N427 And His Friend, The Serial Number Sticker That "Fell Off".

[Lucius Paisley]

The Infamous Ibanez N427 And His Friend, The Serial Number Sticker That "Fell Off".

At the moment, I'm scouring through a lot of second hand areas (Facebook Marketplace, Reverb, eBay, etc.) looking at particular guitars for possible future projects and one thing I have seen a lot of is Ibanez (mostly rumoured to be GIOs) with printed headstocks that have no serial number, a sticker with a serial number to an altogether completely different guitar, the four digits 'N427', and various combinations of these three things.

A lot of the time the painted part of the headstock will have the Ibanez logo, with or without GIO above it, and in most cases, no 'tick' through the logo.

Does anybody know the full explanation of what is behind this? Are they fakes, rejects, or forgotten relics of the technological age (I didn't have a third thing)?

Are parts of these guitars salvageable in some way? Can they be rescued and made into a decent instrument at all?

 

[AlexR]

Re: The Infamous Ibanez N427 And His Friend, The Serial Number Sticker That "Fell Off

Re: The Infamous Ibanez N427 And His Friend, The Serial Number Sticker That "Fell Off

If you haven't yet realised that expensive/desirable things in the world are counterfeited in order to lure people into buying them based on what they aren't, then maybe now is the time to start critically looking at the world.

And such items are made merely to be the cheapest they can be....whilst looking somewhat like the real thing to the gullible. No specific effort will have been made to make them sound right though. A 'decent instrument' as an outcome is a wholly subjective term.